ART APPRECIATION

MODERN INDIAN ART

CONTENT :
- Amrita Sheer-Gil (1913 -1941) -
Brahmacharis, Oil on canvas
- Bride's Toilet
- Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)
- Untitled images
- Akbar Padamsee
- Syed Haider Raza
Amrita Sheer-Gil (1913 -1941)
- Amrita Sher-Gil was an eminent Indian painter .
- Today considered an important woman painter of 20th century
India.
- Masters of Bengal School of art.
- ‘Most expensive' woman painter of India.
- Born in Budapest, Hungary.
- In 1921 her family moved to Summer Hill, Shimla in India.
-At sixteen, Sher-Gil sailed to Europe with her mother to train as
a painter at Paris.
- In 1929, she joined the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.
- She drew inspiration from European painters such as Paul
Cézanne and Paul.
- Her early paintings display a significant influence of the Western
modes of painting.
CAREER -
- In 1932, she made her first important work, Young Girls,
which led to her election as an Associate of the Grand Salon in
Paris in 1933 .
-In 1934, while in Europe she "began to be haunted by an
intense longing to return to India," "Feeling in some strange
way there lay my destiny as a painter”.
- She was greatly impressed and influenced by the Mughal and
Pahari schools of painting and cave paintings at
Ajanta Caves.
- Later in 1937 - South India & produced trilogy paintings -
Fruit Vendors, Bride's Toilet', 'Brahmacharis' and 'The South
Indian Villagers , etc …..
- These reveal her passionate sense of color .
- All her paintings portray incredibly thin, emaciated starving men
and women .
- All the figures painted by her, especially those of women, have
lackluster eyes, an expression of resignation and
despondency writ large on their drawn faces.
- Being a woman, she was naturally more interested in painting women
and their activities.
- European idiom with its naturalism and textured application of paint
include a number of self portraits.
- There are also many paintings of life in Paris, nude studies, still life
studied, as well as portraits of friends and fellow students.
- Her style underwent a radical change by the mid- 30s.
- Her yearn for India, and by 1934, the family returned. This time, she
looked at India with the eyes of an artist.
- The colours, the textures, the vibrancy and the earthiness of the
people had a deep impact on the young artist.
Brahmacharis

Bride's Toilet
 Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)
• Born in an affluent Bengali family .
• The versatile genius developed an acute sensibility towards
various art forms such as literature, poetry, dance and music.
• Tagore’s journey as a painter began in his late sixties as an extension
of his poetic consciousness.
• Though he had hardly any formal training in art, he developed a
highly imaginative and spontaneous visual vocabulary, enhanced by a
sound understanding of visual art practices such as modern
western, primitive and child art.
• Tagore gradually produced a variety of images including fantasized
and bizarre(very odd & strange) beasts, masks, mysterious human
faces, mystic landscapes, birds and flowers.
• His work displays a great sense of fantasy, rhythm and vitality.
• Tagore celebrated creative freedom in his technique .
• He never hesitated to daub and smear colored ink on paper to give
life to his disquieting range of subjects
(feeling of worry & anxiety).
• For Tagore, art was the bridge that connected the individual with
the world .
• Rabindranath use of color is muted and he mostly used earth-hues
like brown, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, chrome yellow, Indian red,
vermilion, orange, black and indigo.
• He preferred the spirit-based Pelican coloured-inks as it dried fast
when applied on paper and gave luminous, transparent hues.
Sometimes he used opaque colours to highlight certain areas or to
create textures on paper.
• The faces painted by Rabindranath express different moods:
mysterious, brooding, dramatic, and romantic, of wonderment, fear
and melancholia. Some of the faces look like masks.
 "Tagore looks as
if he is in bed...
Famous are his 'Rabindra Sangeets' and dance dramas. His songs and
dances enchant the spectators with their free and flowing style (in
comparison to conventional Indian music and dance).  
 Akbar Padamsee
 Akbar Padamsee an inveterate modernist .
 Received his diploma from the Sir J.J. School of Art in
Mumbai.
 He left for Paris in 1951 and lived and worked there till his
return in 1967. Among several shows he has had major
retrospectives in Mumbai and New Delhi in 1980.
 He is acutely aware of every brush stroke; the process of
creation is one of contemplation and articulation of thoughts and
ideas.
 The most familiar works from his extensive oeuvre are the
metascapes and mirror images, and the figures and heads, which
he keeps oscillating between. The metascapes are a
development from landscapes, while the mirror images show his
concern with the duality of existence, of form and space .
 The figure is treated not as an individual, not even in the
heads where the association with portraiture is even
stronger. The only occasion when he has handled portraits
of known people, was in 1997, with his Gandhi series of
works on paper in watercolor and charcoal.
 Akbar Padamsee has exhibited his works in several solo
exhibitions, including most recently, ‘Sensitive Surfaces’
at Galleries Helene Lamarque, Paris, in 2008; ‘Metascapes
to Humans cape’ at A icon Gallery, New York and Palo
Alto, in 2007; and ‘Photographs (2004-06)’ at the Guild
Art Gallery, Mumbai, in 2006.
 Padamsee lives and works in Mumbai.
 Syed Haider Raza
o Syed Haider Raza was born in 1922 in Madhya Pradesh and
studied painting at the Nagpur School of Art and the Sir
J.J.School of Art.
o S.H.Raza is better known as the ‘master of colors’.
o His works basically include real and abstract landscapes
blossomed with vibrant colors .
o Raza emphasized western modernism and his paintings always
depicted abstraction .
o Raza is mainly a nature based painter .
o His use of heavy paint and pulsating (moves in & out ,shakes
with strong , regular & movement)colors makes one gaze at
his landscapes .
o A strong colorist Raza's painting resonate the passionate hot
colours of India with all their symbolic, emotive value .
o While drawing from memories of childhood spent in the forests
he has also been inspired by Indian metaphysical
thought .
o Many of his paintings have a dark circular focal point
termed the Bindu which according to him is the fountain head
of both energy and creativity .
o The strong colours and geometric shapes in Raza's
paintings have sometimes been mistaken for neo-
Tantric (relating to or connected with a particular
movement in Buddhism & Hinduism ) art but according to
the artist there is no affiliation with that school.
o Pre-occupied with imminent energies, he is a modernist
involved with the plastic qualities of art and its emergence on
the surface.
o Raza lives and works in Paris and in Gorbio in south
France.
Abstract
Abstract Art
THANK YOU